Traveling from New Spain to Mexico

Antonio Garciacute;a Cubasrs"Carta general de la Repuacute;blica Mexicana(1857), a widely acclaimed map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the countryrs"s geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his lifers"s work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how Garciacute;a Cubas fabricated credible and inspiring nationalist visual narratives for a rising sovereign nation by linking old and new visual strategies. From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had envisioned New Spain (colonial Mexico) in texts, maps, and other images. In the first decades of the 1800s, ideas about Mexican, rather than Spanish, national character and identity began to cohere in written and illustrated narratives produced by foreign travelers. During the nineteenth century, technologies and processes of visual reproduction expanded to include lithography, daguerreotype, and photography. New methods of display-such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairs-signaled new ideas about spectatorship. Garciacute;a Cubas participated in this emerging visual culture as he reconfigured geographic and cultural imagery culled from previous mapping practices and travel writing. In works such as theAtlas geograacute;fico(1858) and theAtlas pintoresco eacute; historico(1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.